Written Answers Monday 20 October 2008

Scottish Executive

Ministerial Meetings

John Farquhar Munro (Ross, Skye and Inverness West) (LD): To ask the Scottish Executive when ministers last met representatives of each of Scotland’s heating oil distribution companies.

Stewart Maxwell: No such meetings have taken place.

Poverty

Mary Scanlon (Highlands and Islands) (Con): To ask the Scottish Executive what action is being taken to ensure that the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation identifies poverty and deprivation in remote and rural areas.

Stewart Maxwell: The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) has been designed for a specific purpose, to identify small area concentrations of multiple deprivation across Scotland, and does this well. The indicators which make up the SIMD are chosen because they are measures of deprivation regardless of where a person lives.

  Discussions with rural stakeholders have demonstrated that rural disadvantage isn’t about small area concentrations of multiple deprivation so amending or creating a new SIMD for rural areas would not help and we do not intend to do so.

  To inform policy relating to these issues other work and methodologies need to be used. Specific projects being taken forward include research into the experience of poverty in urban and rural areas and an analysis of the data sources that can be used to inform understanding of the cost of living in urban and rural areas. This work will help us better understand rural disadvantage and how it can best be tackled, possibly working towards the development of a set of indicators that can better measure rural disadvantage.